Theology of FAIL

So I finally finished my paper. It was an interesting journey. I started out wanting to investigate the use of the idea of "power" in Barth's thought but ended up doing a Barth/Hegel comparison that took me to see the idea of "failure" in Barth's thought instead. Weird thing that research does to you.

The bottom line for my thought is failure can be sobering. Everyone should experience it from time to time. I think Barth becomes so Christocentric (more like Luther than Calvin) because he is more aware of human fallibility. Now this is often interpreted that he has no place for the church, sacraments or ethics, but that interpretation is just rubbish. My contention is that he emphasized action after the event of the revelation of Christ the Word, but it is action aware of both the triumphs and failures found in everything human. However, Barth makes the claim that is why grace comes first then command because God chooses to act through fallible, imperfect beings.

Where does Hegel fit in? Well, Hegel is all about emphasizing the inconsistency of human thought and action. However, this needs to be experienced by the human agent so he or she can learn through process and struggle. It is to learn in the "broken middle", as Gillian Rose has said, because there is a social aspect to knowledge and a trail of failures.

Where do I go from here? Well, part of the idea of failure is to perhaps link it to the idea of comedy or humor (like Judith Butler does with the Hegelian Spirit); it is a theme I started working on right off the bat of my doctoral program specifically looking at Zizek and Deleuze. It is a mode that is primed to deal with the contradictions and the inconsistencies that life throws at you, struggling through them, without resorting to either cynicism, which avoids conflict at an ironical distance (Zizek's pet peeve), or fascism, which tries to cover over the differences with a totalizing system; both cynicism and fascism cannot deal with failure or humor. In short, emphasizing the gap of human knowledge, about ourselves and other things, tries to prevent the systems of hubris that claim any type of absolute knowledge.

What does a non-totalizing Hegel look like?

Just to add what the non-totalizing Hegel sounds like, see how Clayton Crockett describes Hegel's dialectic:

"The Hegelian dialectic “works” by not working, by breaking down and exposing the gap that persists between reality and our ideals. It’s not that the dialectic gets reality to become our ideal; it’s that the dialectic shows how reality IS the irreducible gap within our ideals themselves."

"What the dialectic does is show us the split between what religion promises in an ideal way and what it can actually accomplish, as well as the gap between the actual state of political affairs and what the political is theoretically supposed to accomplish. This gap is internal to philosophy, to religion/theology, and to politics itself. And the Hegelian dialectic is the process that propels us to think about these problems in a complex, historical, contextual, abstract and concrete way. But we have to free ourselves from the modern progressive view that Hegelian Absolute Knowledge simply overcomes the Kantian antinomies AND the postmodern critique of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge as this devouring monster. We never escape the interrelated nexus of problems that we call philosophy, religion and politics, and we need to return to Hegel to understand this nexus, but we never return to Hegel in any simple or positivistic fashion."

My Barth's Ethics paper: Ethics of Failure

First, the probably most important discovery of the research of this paper is the work of the Jewish/Christian philosopher Gillian Rose. Planning to read her almost exclusively this summer starting with her Hegel book.

Anyway, below is the outline of my paper-in-progress:

Thesis: I claim there is a certain element of the Hegelian dialectic in Barth's thought as especially seen in his ethics.

First, cover the secondary literature criticizing the Hegelian/Barth method (Hoff essay especially).

Second, cover the work of those who see links between Hegel and Barth (Ward, Shanks)

Third, cover the secondary literature that emphasize Barth's dialectical ethics (Cough, Haddorff, Nimmo vs Biggar)

Fourth, critique Barth's reading of Hegel with the non-totalizing Hegel of Slavoj Zizek and Gillian Rose

Finally, dive into Barth's ethics that emphasize act but always beginning again at the beginning (no synthesis)-so then we have a non-totalizing Barth

Conclusion-Barth is like the new reading of Hegel that emphasize the fallibility of human acts and the failures of the acts forward but the point is the journey is the important part for the movement of truth. Grace institutes action that struggles through the contradictions of "this" world but also keeps itself open to new possibilities without falling into the dual trap of conservatism or relativism. However, ethical agents cannot afford to escape this middle, dialectical area of the ethical decision because one cannot simply rely on law but also cannot rely on solipsism. The event opens up the critical points for faith to challenge the law to make a better, new way for the social-political setting.

So I have really tried to latch on the idea of "failure" in Barth as a way to caution the ethical agent in the reality of following the command of God. I'm thinking this might be a good idea to then eventually look at the same idea in a Hegel, Kierkegaard, Zizek or Rose in the future. I think the idea of "failure" prevents both systematization and relativism.